


Legacy (The No Reason Remix)

by claudiapriscus



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Gen, Implied Relationships, POV Mary Winchester, Pre-Series, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 19:39:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1523141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claudiapriscus/pseuds/claudiapriscus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What do you want, a boy or a girl?" Asks the woman at the check out line, the little old man walking his dog, says the mailman, says the neighbors.<br/>"I don't mind, as long as it's healthy," Mary replies, always serene, always even.</p><p>It's a ritual Mary knows it in all its variations.<br/>It's usually an evasion. It's always a lie.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legacy (The No Reason Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tifaching](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tifaching/gifts).
  * Inspired by [No Reason](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/48377) by Tifaching. 



From nearly the beginning of her pregnancy, Mary's sleep is troubled with nightmares and dark, unsettling dreams. She's haunted in sleep with visions of strange men who linger in shadows and whose faces are always just turned away when she tries to catch a glimpse of them. And then there's the other man, the one whose face is all she ever sees. He watches her with eyes wet and shining, his gaze intense and heavy. _Promise me,_ he says, and then she wakes with a pounding heart, a dry mouth, and a face wet with tears.

Those are her nights. But her days- oh, her daydreams are far more pleasant, full of little girls with blonde curls, with her mother's smile, and her father's eyes. She thinks of frilly dresses and finger paints and sharing the secrets of daisy chains. People often ask her what her preference would be, and she gives the same old answer, _as long as it's healthy,_ and people smile and nod as if she hadn't just side-stepped the question. It's an old superstition that keeps her from answering, but unlike most, she knows the reasons behind it, and that makes it even harder to leave behind. John, she knows, would prefer a son, even though he's never said so- and probably would never say so. But she can't quite miss the way his eyes soften when she teases him about becoming a little league dad, the way his hand lingers ever so slightly over the blue paint samples for the baby's room. He wants a son, wants to impart to him all the things his stepfather did, wants all the afternoons of playing catch and fixing cars and imparting time-worn wisdom before first dates.

He speaks a lot about his stepfather, these days, so much so that she almost expects to look up and see the old man lurking behind him, staring down over his shoulder, and shooting him paternal frowns and small, proud smiles as John lays plans and tackles problems and trips over the punchlines of old, old jokes.

She wonders, some times, if John's sudden nostalgia says more about the absences he carefully skirts around than it does the gruff, taciturn old soldier that she's come to love as her father-in-law. Wonders if his unspoken fantasies have him reflecting more on the father who left him than the father who raised him. Wonders if he's driven by the kind of father he won't be more than the memories of the father he wants to become.

Or maybe if she's just wanting to see in him what she sees in herself. John doesn't linger in the past- makes an effort, in fact, to keep it far behind him. _I was a soldier_ , he told her, as if that answered anything. He'd curled up behind her and pressed his face into the space between her shoulder blades, and whispered it into her skin. _You either keep it behind you, or you spend the rest of your life trapped in the mire and the muck of the war you left behind._ He'd kissed her neck, laid one possessive hand over her not yet rounded stomach. The heat of his skin against hers had felt like a brand. Like a promise. _It's over and done,_ he'd said, _Don't let it define you._

And maybe she would have. Maybe if the death of her parents had been the murder-suicide John had thought it was, she could have mourned it and moved on. Maybe if that were the only thing hanging over the peace she's won them. It's not so simple, and some nights- the bad nights- she can feel the weight of the past dragging her down in iron-forged chains. But for John. John's her anchor to the here and now and her bridge to so many bright tomorrows. He talks big about the future when she can barely bring herself to think of it. It's not in his nature to be haunted by the might-have-beens. His dreams are born of gratitude. And hers-

Hers are born of absence. Driven by it, in fact. She wants so many things for this child of theirs, and all of them are the things she wanted so much for herself. Her mother never taught her to make daisy chains. There were no innocent, sun-drenched days of finger paints and frilly dresses, because Campbells lived their lives under siege. Even as a child, she knew the limits of _safe._ She knew that it was never absolute: her world was a fragile thing, easily shattered and never mended.

Her child will never know that uncertainty. Her child will never learn to fear the monsters under the bed if it takes her takes a hundred demon deals and whatever's left of her soul. She knows it, she swears it, and so she pushes her night terrors behind her and fills her daytime fantasies with tea parties and stuffed rabbits and ballet shoes, and thinks of it as rebellion. She'll spit in fate's eye. No child of hers will live a life defined by absence. Mary's children will be free, and safe, and will dream the big dreams of their father. They'll never learn to cast silver bullets. Never get used to the smell of putrefaction and burning flesh. They'll go to prom, they'll take piano, and they'll shriek and complain at the thought of rat traps in the attic. Mary's going to shatter the Campbell legacy on everything soft and mundane.

In her heart of hearts, Mary wants a daughter. John wants a son. She will voice neither, but she knows. And if she could tell him, if she could release the hold of habit and superstition from her tongue, she'd tell him she'll happily give him all the sons he could want, if only their first child can be a daughter. She needs a token, a covenant, that her family's legacy has been redeemed. That all they suffered wasn't in vain..

The baby kicks. She presses one hand against her belly. _Deanna_ , she thinks. She feels the baby kick again, as if in approval. _Oh,_ she thinks, _be a **girl.**_

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Moonshayde for a quick and heroic beta, despite facing the kind of last-minute challenges that'd have had a lesser person throwing in the towel.


End file.
